Nights START

'HANNAH! HANNAH!'

Jon shot up violently on the bed and threw away the rough fabric of the hospital sheets. He looked to the side to see Patty resting with her head on the bed and he rocked her awake.

'Where's Hannah!' Jon asked, as she rubbed her red eyes and looked up.

Patty coughed once before she cracked into a cry as she reached her arms around Jon. Holding the trembling body of Patty, reality slowly began to set in.

'Hannah...?'

The pains from his injuries announced their presence now with his every breath, and Jon soon passed out into a fever.

It was days later before he was in any condition to sit up. Throughout that time, Patty has come in and out intermittently, putting plates of sliced fruits on the bedside table next to him.

Several police officers came in and out during those periods, but Jon couldn't remember anything that has happened.

He was discharged from the hospital two weeks later, and he returned to his university room.

On the table laid an unopened envelope and a tablet that Jon didn't recognize.

Tearing open the seals, there was only a single piece of paper in there with a line of coarse writing.

"NOW THAT YOU HAVE LEARNED YOUR LESSONS."

Jon can feel the fire inside him boiling up to the point that he is struggling to contain it. However, he didn't let the outburst damage anything around him. Instead, he kept it saved up and tucked away.

This is for sure not the only thing that whoever it is behind the scenes is going to do.

Opening up the tablet, Jon found that it is only tuned to a single news article source online, and it is that Jon is allegedly directly linked to Hannah's death in the park of zone four. However, the case was only labeled to be that of gross negligence in the case of an underground superhuman conflict which has resulted in the immediate expelling of him from the University of Zone one.

They wanted to put a murder charge on top of Jon's head too, but thankfully the justice department of zone one isn't failing yet. Even so, Jon is now a hundred percent certain that it is not just his father working against him in the underworld, but also someone working here out on the surface.

He will find out who that is, and in order to track this down, Jon needed the help of Patty.

Knocking on her doors at the end of the corridor, she slipped it partially open to make sure it is Jon before letting him in. Her eyes are red and rough, and the natural brown of her hair began to poke through near the roots of her hair. Realizing that she is in a much worse state mentally than Jon is, he now found it borderline impossible to ask her anything.

However, this choice isn't up to him, it is up to her.

Placing down the piece of paper and the tablet showing the article on the floor between them, Jon explained all that has happened. However, Patty doesn't look like she is listening in the slightest.

'If I am them, I would use my rampage in the underworld as evidence that I directly killed Hannah.' Jon said slowly just so Patty can at least know everything that he is thinking, 'I need your help to track down who wrote this piece of paper and gave me this tablet.'

'Hannah...is really gone...' Patty murmured, 'and you are moving on as if it is normal?'

'....Everyone griefs differently.' Jon said, looking down and letting his long black hair cover up his eyes, 'I will go back down to stop the business of the RED compound for good, but I hope to hear from you when I get back.'

With that, Jon left behind a way for Patty to get in touch, snapped his university card in half, and left the place that he had been staying at for the past three years.

He is going straight back to the underworld with all but one purpose.

He is there to clean house.

Years later, there was a legend within the underworld about a demon that descended from the sky with a vengeance who singlehandedly dismantled the Borneat family. There were mountains of bodies from the servants and soldiers of Borneat family just piling up in the districts and the main compound, and the destruction to its headquarters was so severe that eventually the entire place is knocked down and flattened before any semblance of rebuilding can take place.

In a single night, the single biggest dominant force in the district is no more, and it is said that the demon left the scene covered in blood as if it has just escaped the darkest pit of hell, and it cried for days after it all in the wilderness.

Jon didn't only track down his family, but also all of those in the underworld that had links with the RED compound based on a list of contacts he found in his father's office. He went through each of the districts one by one, rooting out all of those that are involved in the distribution of RED before tracking down the various plantations that are actively making and harvesting RED.

Instead of going in, he instead entered into his ESCALATION 2 and blew all of them apart like houses of cards from the distance.

The entire underworld was completely shaken up because of what he has done. The power dynamics of the past are no more, with the vacuum created due to the overnight collapse of the Borneat family, more vicious battles are fought all around for the control of the districts as far more radical gangs rose up and took the family's place.

However, those are stories for another day.

No longer bothered to wash away the smell of blood on his hands, Jon stepped through the portal and left the underworld behind him. The bloodshed around by no means started with him, though Jon isn't really doing zone negative one any favors through his rampage.

And he did NOT found the truth that Hannah was looking for. Rather, he also delivered vengeance in her name.

Jon knew what Hannah would think of him when they reunited at the end of their lives. But...everyone grieves differently.

Returning to the surface, everything happened exactly as Jon had predicted. Before he made it to the underworld to shut down the Borneat family, the footage of him rampaging through a city street and destroying everything was already floating everywhere online, as an arrest warrant was what awaits him alongside a single email from Patty.

It was an encrypted voice recording which carried a self-deleting function. Whatever she found out must have been really sensitive.

'Jon, as I am recording this, things have changed again. You are now branded as a murderer, and I cannot...cannot afford to let me family know of our association...I have done the search you are looking for, and the strings of coordinates are where I tracked the source of the note and the tablet back to. But...this is a lot bigger than both of you realized, and even the city government wanted to suppress this secret...Be careful, and don't do anything stupid.....'

'This message will be scrambled in 3....2....1....'

Knowing that replying to Patty will do more harm than good, Jon looked up his own name in the news. Never a good decision, but this is the best way for him to gauge what has happened. Now, Hannah was labeled as one of the many victims of his.

The scary thing is, Jon doesn't even know if they are wrong about that.

Nothing new, but not something Jon wanted to face now.

The footage itself was slightly adjusted and edited in order to make the streets match up more and more with the appearances of S Prime, though the architecture of the underworld is often drastically different. Not that anyone is really going to care to be at his defense anyway.

Not that he is interested in defending himself in the court.

Looking up the strings of coordinates, Jon selected the next points of his attack.

The dean's office of the University, the cameraman's association of zone four, the local police station...

All of them are involved in the distribution of the RED compound in zone four, and all of them wanted to keep this a secret.

When Hannah was putting through her project application, those were the institutions that the documents went through, and it likely that any linkage in that chain is responsible for leaking the information down to the underworld, or worse yet...all of them are involved.

Up here on the surface, it isn't enough for Jon to rain down destruction. Things work differently, and people are willing to talk with a bit more....persuasion.

Up here on the surface, it's all about the narrative.

Buying all of the remaining analog electric cameras from the school store, Jon went on his second rampage, this time to find the footage he needed.

The school's dean put up an initial fight, but Jon also had to bring out the footwork as fast as shooting stars in order to make him run for his life before pleading to do whatever Jon wanted.

The cameraman's association in zone four was more trouble than he expected, but when he eventually made it to the head, he made her do the exact same.

Rinse and repeat, and Jon obtained all of the footage that he wanted.

This will be HIS narrative, breaking all of the taboos, laws, and rules of being a cameraman, and yet this is how he will find HIS truth.

This was the last hurrah of Jon being a cameraman, and the very first.

'State your name.'

'I am...Dr Julio Charmers...Dean of the University...'

'State what you have done.'

'I...the business with the RED compound is a matter of extreme importance...a student had no business budging in it...and...OWWWWWW...I just forwarded it to the corresponding parties...'

'Do you plead guilty for the death of Hannah Bettrick?'

'I didn't do it! It was the Borneat family!'

'State your name.'

'Uz Klous...Cameraman Association in zone four...'

'State what you have done.'

'I approved Hannah's mission.'

'State ALL that you have done.'

'....I also alerted the.....requisite organizations in the underworld.'

'Do you plead guilty for the death of Hannah Bettrick?'

'.....'

'State your name.'

'Officer Lisa....'

'State what you have done.'

'I was instructed to put together and close up a case against one Jon Borneat by someone from above, and any case of strange occurrences in the case is to be made in favor of Jon Borneat's conviction...Who...who are you?'

'I am just a cameraman. One that's fucking angry.' The man asking the questions said, 'Hope you are happy with the fucking truth.'

With that, the video cut to black.

It was an earth-shaking release for the internet of S Prime city, with various organizations scrambling to patch together their PR and perform internal cleanups. Of course, the fact that whoever took all of this footage blatantly ignored all of the rules of being a cameraman meant some have used this as an excuse to discredit the footage.

During all of the chaos, people of zone four surprisingly were the ones to rise up, and in the name of the vigilante's cameraman, they protested on the streets against the corruption of the local police department, leading to various superpowered clashes on and around the area with more blood being spilled.

'Now she is going to hate me for real.' Jon chuckled as he buried the camera that he has used in a park in zone four before he stood up and headed towards the edge of the city.

S Prime is no longer a place for him. His bright days are gone, and his dark nights are only beginning.

Over the next few years, Jon managed to start over, keeping nothing except for his first name as he managed to find a labor job in S city. He never cared for what happened later in S Prime, and he simply put his head down and worked, settling for a simple life.

After earning enough money to rent a place to stay in S city, Jon appeared at the doorsteps of the C Institute, the institution that housed the Cameraman's association.